Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties

Introduction

A quarter of a century has passed since I wrote this book. The events described here are now more than half a century old. Yet, the memory of the sixties remains fresh in my mind. This is not simply the nostalgia of a man in his eighties. The decade of the sixties was one of those special moments in our history when important public issues animated our citizens, when large achievement seemed a realistic possibility, and when the American faith was charged with a determination equal to the needs and the promise of the nation.

I was in my twenties when I joined John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign and then entered the White House as assistant special counsel to the president. From my cramped office in the West Wing, I experienced the joy and heartbreak of the thousand days that followed — the soaring inaugural speech, the humiliating failure of the Bay of Pigs, the skillful handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the struggles in Mississippi and Alabama, the hesitant introduction of the civil rights bill, and of course, the assassination.

The line most remembered from Kennedy’s inaugural was essentially a summons to our generation: Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country. It was what we wanted to hear. It seemed to us a promise that we might have the chance to participate in something beyond our personal concerns, to share in the life of our country.

That promise was first made real with the introduction of the Peace Corps. At 2:00 a.m. on a chilly fall night three weeks before the presidential election, our small campaign entourage arrived at the University of Michigan to discover that thousands of students had remained awake to hear the senator deliver informal remarks. While Kennedy mounted the steps of the union, fellow speechwriter Ted Sorensen and I, famished from a day that had begun over eighteen hours earlier, rushed to the cafeteria, which had thankfully been kept open. Before we reached dessert, a staff member hurried in to inform us that Kennedy had proposed an as-yet nonexistent Peace Corps and that hundreds of students were already signing up! We were too tired to react. Fuller consideration of the program that would become a defining symbol of the Kennedy administration would have to await a few hours’ sleep.

For many Americans, John F. Kennedy still embodies the spirit of the sixties. Gifted with eloquence, vitality, and grace, he made us believe that we could make our country better, that we could harness our collective energies toward common goals — from increasing social justice to landing on the moon. Frozen in memory as a young man, he remains a symbol of hope, action, and possibility.

Little could I have imagined when I was asked to remain on the White House staff with Lyndon B. Johnson after Kennedy’s death that this new Southern president would do more than any other since Abraham Lincoln to undo the original sin of the American nation—racial injustice. In a few short years, with the momentum of the civil rights movement behind him, he brought an end to the legalized apartheid that had scarred Southern society since the Civil War, and with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, millions of African Americans were guaranteed the right to vote that had been systematically denied them for decades. And he pushed for these measures knowing that in doing so, his Democrat party would lose the South for a generation.

I left the LBJ White House in the fall of 1965, when the conflict in Vietnam had been escalated into an American war with American troops. I did not see then—could not have seen—the full disaster the war would become. With each passing day, the laser-like focus the president had once given to his domestic agenda was turned increasingly to Vietnam. My work in the White House was primarily involved with civil rights and the programs that comprised the Great Society. And with the acceleration of the war, domestic progress was essentially frozen.

Leaving LBJ … was not easy. From my post at the White House, I had been deeply involved in the central issues of the day. My drafting of the president’s We Shall Overcome speech on voting rights, delivered to a joint session of Congress, will forever remain one of the most fulfilling moments of my public career. Throughout my tenure at the White House, LBJ had always treated me with dignity and respect, and even though he threatened to draft me when I first told him I was leaving, he eventually accepted my decision, writing a moving tribute that hangs on the wall in my study today.

As LBJ continued his relentless escalation of the Vietnam War, I publicly broke with the administration, and in 1968 I left my teaching position at MIT to join Eugene McCarthy’s crusade to challenge LBJ in the New Hampshire primary. Then in my thirties, I was an old man compared to the thousands of college and high school students who comprised the best field organization I had ever seen. Working with these passionate, dedicated volunteers who willingly cut their hair and beards to be neat and clean for Gene remains one of the most joyful experiences of my public life. They called me the Che Guevara of the teenyboppers—a title I accepted with pride. On Election Day, McCarthy came within a few hundred votes of beating the president—an astonishing victory.

No dramatist could have foretold the cascading events that followed. Days after McCarthy’s impressive showing on March 12, Robert Bobby F. Kennedy announced on March 16 that he had decided to run for the nomination; three weeks later LBJ shocked the nation with his declaration that he was withdrawing from the race; the following week, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis; and two months later Bobby Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles.

Over the years, Bobby had become one of my closest friends. We had traveled together through South America, paddled a canoe on the Amazon, dared each other to swim in piranha-infested waters, and shared a love of poetry and fiction. I was with him in Los Angeles the night he was shot; his death brought an end to my public career. Haunted by the war in Vietnam and the violence that took the lives of three of our most gifted leaders, I retreated to Maine and later to Boston, where I have raised a family and written books, essays, articles, and a play.

Only now, as the passions and divisions spawned by LBJ’s escalation of the war recede into history, can we begin to appreciate the magnitude of his domestic achievements and the truly visionary nature of the agenda he pursued.

The fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act has rightly brought attention to the extraordinary skill LBJ evidenced in reaching across the aisle to secure Republican support to break the Southern Democratic filibuster. After promising Republican Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen everything under the sun for the senator’s state of Illinois, LBJ closed the deal in brilliant fashion. Everett, you come with me on this bill and two hundred years from now, schoolchildren will know only two names: Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen. How could Dirksen resist? Then, though warned by advisors that the country needed to absorb the desegregation bill before moving on to voting rights, LBJ insisted that the right to vote was the meat in the coconut, and put it at the top of his agenda the following year.

It has become fashionable to decry the grandiosity of the Great Society’s goals, but substantial strides toward greater economic and social justice were made with the cluster of laws and programs that included the War on Poverty, Head Start, the Teacher Corps, and Model Cities. At Howard University, two months after the We Shall Overcome speech, LBJ proclaimed that freedom is not enough. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. The next stage in the battle for civil rights, he said, must recognize that ability is stretched or stunted by the family that you live with, and the neighborhood you live in—by the school you go to and the poverty or the richness of your surroundings.

And in the midst of this torrent of bills designed to increase opportunity for the young came Medicare, a triumph, LBJ said, not only for the elderly, but also for the country as a whole. No longer will this Nation refuse the hand of justice to those who have given a lifetime of service and wisdom and labor, said LBJ as he signed the historic act.

Our domestic problems today are significant, but no greater than those we confronted in the sixties. If my journey to the past has any larger meaning, it is my hope that it will inspire a younger generation to take up where we left off—to try, as we did, with some success and some failure, to bring our beloved country closer to its ancient ideals.

Richard N. Goodwin

July 2014

Concord, Massachusetts

Prelude

Hello darkness, my old friend

I’ve come to talk with you again.

— Paul Simon, The Sound of Silence

AT NOON, January 20, 1961 — two and a half years after my graduation from law school — I became assistant special counsel to the president of the United States. My elevation took place simultaneously with that far more historic moment when John Kennedy took the inaugural oath before the aging hero of liberalism, Chief Justice Earl Warren. As I stood in that bitter-cold, iridescent day — sun glistening from the marble, the snow scattered from the unobstructed heaven — it seemed as if the country and I were poised for a journey of limitless possibility.

After the ceremony, I watched the inaugural parade from the presidential reviewing stand in front of the White House. It was emblematic of New Frontier heroics to come that I sat — along with the president, his family, and other officers of his administration — through the freezing hours of an interminable procession. Will it never end, I thought, shivering, or will the whole country pass in review?

When the parade was over I wandered into the West Wing of the White House to look at my new office. After inspecting my cramped but hugely portentous space, I walked along the first-floor corridor toward the Oval Office. Approaching me — having yielded to a similar impulse to inspect his chambers — I saw the figure with whom I had shared sixty days in the cramped cabin of a twin-engine Convair named Caroline, as we crossed and re-crossed the country during frantic months of campaigning.

Kennedy had changed from his formal wear to a dark business suit; moved with the same purposeful stride. He looks just like he always did, I thought, as if I had expected his ceremonial ascension to metamorphose his outward appearance — ennoble his features, enlarge his physical stature, ready him for immediate transport to Mount Rushmore.

Dick, he called, beckoning me toward him. His voice hadn’t changed either. As I approached him, I could see excitement in his eyes. And why not? I had been exhilarated at the sight of my own small office. He ran the whole place.

Mr. President, I replied.

Mr. President. What grandeur in the phrase, how lovingly it passed my lips. If there was such swollen warmth in saying it, what must it be like to hear?

Did you see the Coast Guard detachment? he asked.

Frantically I canvassed my memory of the parade.

Impatiently Kennedy interrupted my efforts at recollection. There wasn’t a black face in the entire group. That’s not acceptable. Something ought to be done about it.

The observation was an order. It was a manner of command I had learned well over the brief period of my employment. I turned immediately. Struggling to maintain the dignity of office, I walked down the corridor until, turning the corner, I began to run up the stairs toward my office. The Coast Guard? I thought. Who ran the Coast Guard? The Pentagon, Bob McNamara. No, the Treasury Department. Doug Dillon.

Then it struck me: swift, accelerating elation. I was not to draft a statement or make a promise. Now we could do more than talk. We could change it! This was what it had all been about: the struggle, the fatigue, the fear, the uncertainty, the slim, fragile victory. It was the meaning, the essence of that abstraction — power. For a moment, it seemed as if the entire country, the whole spinning globe, rested, malleable and receptive, in our beneficent hands. Here on earth God’s work must truly be our own. I did not pause to reflect upon what I knew with philosophic certainty — that we were neither gods, not special intimates to His will. And why should I? We would do what men could do. And men — determined, idealistic, tough-minded, powerful — could perform great works, high deeds in Albion past all men’s believing.

I picked up the White House phone. Get me Secretary Dillon, please, I asked the White House operator. Dillon listened to my report of the president’s comments. Tell him I’ll get right on it, he replied.

That summer the first black professor was hired at the Coast Guard Academy and the following year four black cadets entered the academy. The first irreversible steps toward desegregation had been taken.

We had made a difference. I had helped make a difference. It was, admittedly, a small problem, one resolvable by presidential authority alone. But it was successfully resolved. And the exhilaration of that achievement reinforced my belief that far larger dangers and difficulties could also be mastered; that it was a great country, but it would be greater.

Seven and one half years later I paced the fifth-floor corridor of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, California. Robert Kennedy was dying. The assassin’s first bullet fired at Kennedy on the eve of his victory in the June California primary entered the head just behind the right ear and hit the spongy mastoid bone, scattering fragments of bone and metal through the brain. Six surgeons operated on the wound for three hours and forty minutes.

For twenty-five hours, a small group of family and friends kept vigil in the hospital. We ate sandwiches, went for occasional walks, looked at the crowd outside, and drank coffee while the accumulated weariness slowly dulled feeling.

For a long time the doctors told us to hope. So we did. Then they said it was hopeless. So we waited. I cried, and then, when it seemed I was too tired to feel anything, I cried again. And at the very end, Kennedy’s boyhood friend, Dave Hackett, touched my arm and said, You’d better go in now if you want to see him. It’s almost over.

I entered Kennedy’s hospital room, where a few minutes later, the doctors finally turned off the machines that pumped the lungs and blood of Robert Kennedy’s corpse. My best and last friend in politics was dead.

A few months later I attended the Democratic convention in Chicago as a delegate from Massachusetts, pledged to Senator Eugene McCarthy. After Bobby’s death, I had rejoined McCarthy’s campaign, knowing that he had no chance of nomination, yet moved by some indefinable inward obligation to finish the year as I had begun it — in the ranks of those committed to an end of the Vietnam war. At McCarthy’s request I drafted a peace plank for the party platform — the text approved by McCarthy, George McGovern, and Edward Kennedy, and tentatively accepted by agents of Hubert Humphrey until a call from the White House commanded the Humphrey forces to reject any statement that hinted at the slightest doubt of Lyndon Johnson’s policies.

Johnson himself had planned to attend the convention until his friends and lieutenants had advised him that a personal appearance would throw the convention into turmoil. I can’t guarantee what’ll happen, Mr. President, explained Congressman Hale Boggs, a Johnson loyalist named to lead the platform committee. You have a lot of friends here, but no one can control these delegates. Your enemies will stir things up. Coming from Boggs, these politic euphemisms could only mean that Johnson would be verbally abused, greeted with jeers, slandered from the floor; exposing the angry ferocity of a divided party to a watching nation.

So Lyndon Baines Johnson, president of the United States, titular head of the Democratic party, recalled the Secret Service agents who had gone to Chicago in preparation for his visit and stayed home. Sitting in a White House that was no longer the vitalizing center of the nation, but an exile’s prison, he mourned: I’ve never felt lower in my life. How do you think it feels to be completely rejected by the party you’ve spent your life with, knowing that your name cannot be mentioned without choruses of boos and obscenities? How would you feel? It makes me feel that nothing’s been worth it. And I’ve tried. Things may not have turned out as you wanted or even as I wanted. But God knows I’ve tried. And I’ve given it my best all these years. I woke up at six and worked until one or two in the morning every day, Saturdays and Sundays. And it comes to this. It just doesn’t seem fair.

It is impossible not to be moved by the poignancy of Lyndon Johnson’s remarks — wholly sincere, totally honest — nor to realize that his personal tragedy of rejection was also a metaphor, a symbolic reenactment of what an entire nation — equally ambitious and hopeful — was also losing as Johnson’s war destroyed Johnson’s Great Society.

As the convention, subordinate to Johnson’s will, proceeded to its ritualistic endorsements of the past, thousands of young people arrived in Chicago to protest the war, the nomination of Humphrey, the Democratic party’s symbolic repudiation of what they had mistakenly thought to be the inevitably triumphant spirit of the sixties. As I stood outside the Hilton Hotel across from Grant Park, I saw the student encampment transformed into a battleground, as members of the Chicago police, unleashed by Mayor Daley without opposition from the White House, mounted attack after attack, clubbing unarmed youths to the ground, dragging them brutally across the trodden grass, shoving them into police wagons.

For a brief moment images out of the past raced through my mind — Birmingham, the bridge at Selma, the flames of Watts. But this was different. It wasn’t racial conflict; nor established privilege defending itself against some illusory fear of revolution. It was working Americans attacking young Americans simply because they were young, or of different upbringing, or thought to be condescending, or, maybe, just because they were there. I recalled the words of a folk song: Where have all the flowers gone? Trampled, I thought, into the earth of Grant Park.

That November, Richard Nixon was elected president of the United States.

The sixties were over. A failure. Their ambiguous promise soon yielding to the drab withdrawal of the decades to follow. The twenty years since those final days in Los Angeles and at the Chicago convention have taken me along the paths of thought and literary creation toward which I was attracted, perhaps destined, from childhood. I have not missed public life. Nor have I written about my brief period of engagement. Not until now; moved to speak by an apprehension that the defeats of the sixties might be more than a temporary setback — that we are threatened with a loss of far vaster dimensions than the collapse of the New Frontier or the Great Society; of larger portent than the destruction and self-destruction of great leaders. The chronicles of great nations are not solely composed of alternating periods of stagnation and progress. They also reveal the possibility of irrecoverable decline.

For the first time since we became a nation, America confronts that possibility. Yet decline, the progressive blight of self-seeking, protective fragmentation, is not inevitable, not necessary. Today, for the first time since our defeat in Vietnam, one senses large numbers of Americans emerging from an almost willed sleep to a repudiation of resignation and an awakening resentment of their loss of power over the direction of the nation and the conditions of their daily life. There is — or seems to be — an emerging desire to grapple with the country’s ills. There is anger at political leadership that has forfeited its claim to confidence and trust. The sixties have passed into history, but the animating spirit of that time is not dead.

Much of what has been written about the sixties recalls the riots of urban blacks and the apotheosis of mind-twisting drugs; hippies and love-ins and communes; the violent furies that loosed citizen against citizen at Grant Park and Kent State; divisions so fierce and profound that the newly elected Nixon could tell us that his mission was to bring us together again. But these were not the sixties. They happened, of course. Had occurred, or begun to emerge, before the final pages were torn from the calendar of the decade. But they came late, after the mad, voracious war had consumed our most expansive sense of possibilities, caused us to doubt the better angels of our nature; impenetrably sheathed our governing institutions against the just claims of our own people. Chronologically part of the decade, they were, in reality, its failure.

Dimly aware that society had lost its capacity to respond, many of those most ardently dedicated to liberating change lashed out in self-defeating fury, or turned to a vain search for some form of fulfillment — of freedom, as they conceived it — outside the larger society. But there can be no country within the country. The new consciousness, the counterculture, had barely emerged before they began to be accommodated, absorbed by the ascendant structures of American life.

The word sixties itself is a convenient label for a multitude of events and people. Yet every decade has its own characteristics, and the sixties were so different from the decades that have followed that its years seem like some faint and distant resonance from a half-alien America — like the Great Depression or the Civil War, the westward settlement or the onset of industrialism. Yet it happened only yesterday. It is within the living memory of every citizen over thirty. The great issues that were then debated have not been resolved. They have deepened, accumulated new and more formidable dimensions. Indeed, my sixties never happened. The decade contained a promise, an augury of possibilities, an eruption of confident energy. It was smothered and betrayed by a needless tragedy of such immense consequences that, even now, the prospects for a restorative return remain in doubt.

At the outset of that decade, aspirations deeply embedded in the country’s history had begun to dominate the public dialogue. A confident nation entered the longest sustained economic boom in its history. The ancient phrases — opportunity, justice, equality — seemed not ritualistic invocations, stock phrases from old Independence Day orations, but guides to action. Their achievement was within our grasp.

We were gifted with leaders of large dimension and capacity — John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the Lyndon Johnson of the Great Society, Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy. But their ascension was not a gift of fortune. Their qualities were also the creation of the people they led; their energy and direction a reflection of a people confident in their power to shape the future — their own and that of the country. If we believed in our leaders, it was because we believed in ourselves. If we felt a sense of high possibilities, it was because the possibilities were real. If our expectations of achievement were great, it was because we understood the fullness of our own powers and the greatness of our country.

This characterization of the sixties is not the product of long-delayed reflection. I believed it, felt it while I lived it, as did many, many others. In 1963, I gave a speech to a group of students from all parts of the world. I was speaking of the Peace Corps as an illustration of the conviction that touches on the profoundest motives of young people throughout the world … tells them … that idealism, high aspirations, and ideological convictions are not inconsistent with the most practical, rigorous, and efficient of programs — that there is no basic inconsistency between ideals and realistic possibilities — no separation between the deepest desires of heart and mind and the rational application of human effort to human problems.… It will be easy, I concluded, to follow the familiar paths — to seek the satisfaction of personal action or financial success.… But every one of you will ultimately be judged — will ultimately judge himself — on the effort he has contributed to the building of a new world society, and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort.

Others might express it differently or better, but that passage contains, for me, the meaning of the sixties. If we have lost what it implies, then the sixties will have been more than an episode of failed ambitions. It will have been a watershed, a decisive turning point in the American story.

I cannot offer an objective history of the sixties. I lived them, with the arrogant, restless, romantic energy of youth. Nor has the passage of years provided detachment. My emotions remain as intensely engaged today as they were on that early evening in January of 1961 when I tumbled toward my office in enthusiastic obedience to John Kennedy’s first presidential command.

I can, however, provide a rather special vantage. Chance, unexpected and, at first, unsought, placed me at the center of national politics: at the Supreme Court with Mr. Justice Frankfurter; in the White House with John Kennedy and with Lyndon Johnson; then in the vanguard of the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. Present while many of the principal events of the sixties unfolded, I observed, participated, reacted, and remembered.

This book is a record of that experience of public life, recalled as honestly as fallible memory permits. It is not a history or a memoir; an autobiography or a critical analysis. It is an exhortation. It is an exhortation to remembrance, written in hope that by recollecting what we were, we may remember what we can be. For the America of such long and noble lineage, this athletic democracy — now dormant — needs only the touch of faith to awaken a strength and courage of imagination more than adequate to navigate beyond the stormy present toward a destiny, never precisely defined, but which, for centuries, has been not the goal, but the meaning of America.

I do not presume to think that this work can alter, even slightly, the contours of American beliefs and expectations. Yet it is the only instrument I have. And it is the truth. I know, even as I try to summon spirits from the vasty deep, they will not come to me. Yet should a nation, an entire people, call on them, they will arrive — transported by the very act of invocation.

PART I / PREPARATION

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

— William Wordsworth

1 / Beginnings

SHINING BLACK CRYSTALS scattered along the sun-scorched stone. I had never seen, nor imagined, the abundance of black bodies that I saw when, aged ten years, I emerged from Washington’s Union Station poised beneath the marble structures from which the country was governed.

Accompanied by my mother and younger brother, I had made the ten-hour train trip from our native Boston to join my father, who had come to work for the Maritime Commission a few months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. A trained engineer, he found his job had disappeared during the depression. He was forced to make his living as an insurance salesman until the godlike Roosevelt had need of men with his skills in the frantic effort to prepare the country for war. Until then, we had lived in a small apartment in a lower-income working-class section of Boston. One rarely saw a black face. The small black population of Boston lived somewhere else; distant from that world, bounded by a few dozen blocks of streets and apartment buildings, from which I was taken on occasional automobile trips to the countryside — my uncle’s place on the lake at Wrentham, or Hood’s farm, where one could watch real cows being milked.

A few months after my father’s departure, an aunt interrupted my tenth birthday party. The Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbor. I barely noticed the swift dissolution of my celebration, feeling a thrill of excitement, an exultation of awareness that great events had happened. And on my birthday. On Dick Goodwin’s day. Ignoring my departing friends I rushed to the radio, listened to the confused tumble of announcements, took several pieces of paper, and penciled the news of the attack across the top of a dozen sheets. I ran down the street to the corner drugstore and offered my homemade broadsheet to passing motorists at the outrageous price of five cents a copy, selling out quickly for enough money to buy six comic books.

I had, for the first time, turned my engagement with language into profit. I could, my mother told me, talk before I could walk; had taught myself, with her help, to read before entering the first grade. By the time of this tenth birthday I was reading the works of James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain. I read at the table, propped books on the sink while brushing my teeth. Books, those fabulous frigates, were not only an escape from more unpleasant aspects of my life, but a source of delight, of pleasurable fulfillment. Perhaps my closest moments with my father, who loved and cherished books, were our walks together to the local public library, which contained a miraculous, unbounded store of tales and adventures. He would accompany me through the shelves, never interfering with my choices, and together we would return home where, stimulated by this tacit paternal blessing, I would turn eagerly from one work to another, embarked — although I did not know it then — on a lifelong love affair with language, its content, and the rhythmically cadenced interior sounds of words themselves. It was natural for me to react to Pearl Harbor by translating experience into headlines and sentences. I had already begun to think of words as the world made manifest.

I soon understood, or was told, that a terrible thing had happened. We were at war. But that reality was an abstraction compared to the fact that my father’s job was secure — at least for the duration. And we were going to Washington, a city whose only known location was in pictures illustrating a few grammar school texts.

Perhaps it was because those photographs had only been accompanied by portraits of grave, dead, famous men, that — half expecting to encounter Abraham Lincoln — I was struck so forcibly by the sight of so many black faces. The sight had no large meaning, aroused no private emotion except astonishment at this first encounter with the wonders of a new world.

The very next day I walked from our new flat in a housing project in now-suburban, then rural, Maryland, to a small creek. Glimpsing a large turtle idling through the slow currents, I rushed home to tell my parents astounding news. I had witnessed, for the first time, a live animal in its natural surroundings.

Toward the blacks as toward the turtle, I felt no sense of apartness except for that part of me which was slowly maturing to a solitary identity, severing me from the universe. Blacks existed. They had been perceived and incorporated by my expanding interior imagination of the world. Later, while attending a segregated school in Washington, when I heard others parrot the catechisms of racial hostility they had picked up at the family table, it meant nothing to me. They were only fashionable expletives — like damn, or hell, or shit — which had no consequences for the real world of a ten-year-old.

There were, as I realized much later, other experiences that formed my attitudes toward the racial battles that were to dominate much of public life in the 1960s. Having grown up in a largely Jewish neighborhood in Boston, the anti-Semitism of Maryland came as a puzzling surprise, soon displaced by fear and, ultimately, defiance. I was frequently harassed and taunted — Jew Boy, kike — and occasionally beaten up by older boys.

Among my circle of friends, members of a neighborhood club we named the Terrible Turtles, there was a boy named Fuzzy Hayes. Bigger than I and stronger, he would occasionally use anti-Semitic phrases in my presence. But he was careful not to press his hostile gibes, and I was afraid of him. One day, when the fresh-laid sod of the housing development was still soaked with spring rains, Fuzzy and two of my friends took a ball from my younger brother. They began to throw it to each other, challenging me to recover it. It was only a game. The ball was caught by Fuzzy, who held it as I ran toward him, but, instead of relaying it, he held on and shouted as I approached, Come get it, Jew Boy. Something in my brain exploded, the entire world was drowned by a torrent of darkening blood. I remember nothing that happened until, a few moments later, some of my friends were pulling me away from Fuzzy Hayes, who lay on the ground, struggling as I held his face in the strangling mud. He was suffocating. And for many years — perhaps even now — my only regret was that I had not killed him.

From that day forward Fuzzy never said an offending word to me. My fear of him was gone. And I noticed that when a group of us walked together, he kept some distance from me, slightly out of reach. I even felt an occasional twinge of affection, quickly suppressed, toward a boy who had managed to make me feel so good about myself.

For almost the first time, the world — not my parents or teachers — had taught me a moral lesson. I did not learn not to be afraid, for I have experienced many moments of fear, far more intense and more firmly grounded in reality. But there is a time when one must yield forever, or hurl oneself at the source, without calculation of probabilities. And in later years when, on television, I watched the bodies of protesting blacks battered by the firehose in the hands of a Birmingham sheriff or club-wielding policemen, I often imagined I saw in their expression of rage the face of Fuzzy Hayes.

In August of 1945, as I sat quietly reading in our apartment, an elongated spherical casing tumbled from a solitary plane toward tranquil, unsuspecting Hiroshima, and the world shuddered. Hearing the news on the radio, I rushed to the kitchen. Mom, they’ve dropped some kind of superbomb on the Japs. The radio says the war is probably over. Does that mean we’ll be going back to Boston? For me, the atomic age meant just that. We moved to Brookline where I completed high school, and then went to Tufts University in Medford, where my performance earned me a full scholarship to Harvard Law School.

That first year at law school was the most intense intellectual experience of my life. College had been the pursuit of grades, largely achieved by temporarily mastering large amounts of course material in the few weeks before examinations. At law school there was no possibility of mastery. The boundaries of understanding were infinite, achievement measured solely by comparison with the performance of five hundred other students — competitors for marks that meant, for those at the top, an invitation to join the Harvard Law Review and a secure path to the highest citadels of the legal profession. Since the results of that competition were determined by a single set of examinations at the end of the year, there was no limit to one’s labors, no possibility of completion. There was always more to know, a deeper level of understanding. For the first time I felt pressed to the limit of my capacity, driven by the unseen hand of competition with men and women whose abilities were unknown.

Later, Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter told me that he still remembered the moment of awed, silent reverence as he stood in a law school corridor while a fellow first-year law student pointed to the back of a young man a few yards away and whispered, "That’s the president of the Law Review." The future justice’s attitude may seem slightly ludicrous to our more egalitarian age, but one should not totally disdain (the tribute mediocrity pays to achievement) a post sought and won by both Alger Hiss and Dean Acheson. Moreover, in practical terms the position opened the door to employment in the most affluent and prestigious law firms, even if you were Jewish.

Late that spring in the crowded silence of Langdell Hall, I sat furiously scribbling lengthy answers to the essentially unanswerable questions posed by my professors. Then I returned home to await the verdict. The completion of the year marked my eighteenth year of incarceration in the American educational system. The state of the world, to which I was largely indifferent, was relatively tranquil. Although Eisenhower had ended the Korean conflict, the wartime draft was still in effect, although as a student I was temporarily exempt from conscription.

In the summer of 1954, a letter from Harvard Law School with a report of grades astonishing to me, my family, and friends arrived at our small Brookline apartment. It was followed by a notice that my performance meant that I — along with the other members of the top twenty-five — was now an editor of the Harvard Law Review and that I was to return several weeks early to begin work on the first issue.

Sometime that August, I drove to the initiating Law Review dinner in my battered Chevrolet convertible — purchased with the residual earnings of my summers as a fry cook (clams, french fries, and onion rings) at nearby Revere Beach, an amusement area for the lower classes (now gone to condominiums). I had spent my summers there since high school, having become semipermanently ensconced behind the scorching Frialators after operating kiddy rides, a Loop-the-Loop, the Virginia Reel, and the fun-house controls, which sent jets of air to lift the skirts of women customers as they crossed a passageway exposed to delighted sidewalk spectators. (I always viewed slacks, then rare, as the greatest challenge to my coordination. If successfully penetrated, the passageway between leg and fabric yielded pleasure of lustful imaginings more gleefully obscene than the sight of still another pair of underpants.)

At the dinner, my classmates and I were congratulated on our ascension into the elite by the president of the Harvard Law Review, who then gave us our first assignment: to verify, for accuracy and relevance, the footnotes of articles scheduled for publication in the first issue of the Review, the country’s leading publication of legal scholarship.

The next morning, manuscript in hand, I entered the cavernous stacks of the law school library. Interminable shelves of books in towered stacks, the volumes multiplied far beyond the precious handful that had yielded the most enraptured moments of my young life. The air was musty, redolent of old bindings, each breath stained with the accumulated dust of the long summer stillness. Commanded from level to level, I had been going to school forever. I reached for a volume of court reports. I couldn’t. It was a prison. I turned, moving swiftly into the bright August heat, entered my car, and drove directly to the Brookline town hall, where I waived my draft deferment.

For years thereafter I explained that I had been conscripted involuntarily by a draft board that had run out of nonexempt candidates; that I had not appealed since I would have to serve when I graduated, and so I might as well get it over. I lied because the truth would have made others regard me as mildly insane or, even worse, as a fool.

Yet, looking back, it seems to me there was in my action some augury of the sixties. Mine was a purely personal act, similar to the mini-revolts of many young people in other times and places. Words like the establishment, the system, had not assumed a pejorative aura, indeed, were rarely heard. Yet there was in what I did something of defiance — not for a cause, not to protest injustice or oppression, but against a structure of rational expectations. I was not motivated by inability or unwillingness to meet the demands of an established order. Quite the contrary. I had conformed my energies to the demands of the structure that opened the path to worldly success. And I had met them. Yet, I had to get away. Some vacancy at the heart demanded response.

A few years later it would have seemed a strange kind of defiance to enter the army, even in peacetime. But I knew no alternative. I was aware of no causes, no movements in which to enlist. There were such possibilities, even then, but they lay beyond my horizon. It was also true my choice virtually eliminated the risk that ordinarily accompanies rebellion. Any suspicion of instability was dispelled by the masquerade of dutiful acquiescence to law. I could always return to Harvard, an honorable veteran of his nation’s service. Yet diluted as it was, it was a reflection of discontent, an undefined act of protest, although I was the only one who knew it.

That same year Elvis Presley was beginning to horrify the respectable with the suggestive gyrations of his hips, and the Supreme Court overturned the precedents of three-quarters of a century in Brown v. Board of Education. In May, while I was preparing for my examinations in property and contract law, a French army surrendered Dien Bien Phu, liberating forces destined to more mightily scar and transform American life than any event since Colonel Anderson led his troops out of fallen Sumter.

Something was in the air. There had to be, although I could not hope to sense it as I sat outside my basic training barracks at Fort Dix alongside a company of other recruits — exhausted, sweat stained after a long bus ride and a night spent half-dozing on the dirt outside still unassigned barracks — while a huge, black, unsmiling sergeant informed us, Your ass is grass, and I is a lawn-mower.

A child of the neon and concrete, having never traveled outside the urban centers of the Northeast, I felt excitement approaching the intensity of disbelief as — my training over — I boarded the propeller-driven military transport that in a mere twenty-two hours would carry me to Frankfurt, from which a train would take me to my assigned station at an ordnance depot located in the forest of Braconne, just outside the town of Angoulême, only sixty-four miles northwest of Bordeaux.

Europe! Through the Looking Glass. Land of Oz. Crystalline fountain of the mythology contained in my history books, progenitor of those adored volumes that had engaged and enlarged my maturing passions. Later I would lie on Wenlock Edge staring at Housman’s woods in trouble, walk the lakes where Wordsworth had seen the human soul mirrored with the Divine, search out the street in which defeated Stendhal had shared the fate of Julien Sorel, watch bulls fall to the swords of Hemingway’s matadors. And Stratford, of course, to sit upon the grass, but not to tell sad stories of the death of kings. Not yet. That time would come years later, and on American soil.

I had no trace of the expatriate longing that had persuaded both Henry James and the writers of the twenties to escape philistine America for a more enriching and appreciative culture. I was quintessentially American, irrevocably rooted in the turbulent energy of my homeland. And Europe was over. It had torn itself apart in some magnified version of the Peloponnesian wars. My anticipation was that of a child’s visit to the circus, a student’s approach to the Louvre, or the excitement I have seen in my own boys as they enter Disney World.

During my eighteen months in France I traveled extensively throughout Western Europe; saw much, experienced much, learned much. Great wine tasted like the musty interior of an old cathedral (so much for Manischewitz), the sight of the Pyrenees sloping into the Atlantic along the road south of Biarritz moved me to tears, dinner at a good French restaurant gave taste a dimension more wondrously alien to my perceptions than Riemannian geometry. I lost a few dollars amid the cathedral hush of a Biarritz casino, caught a distant glimpse of Eisenhower and Khrushchev conveyed by limousines to their Geneva summit, traced the Rhone glacier to its source. And I unmasked, in somewhat obsessive pursuit, the varied exhilarations of sex. But this belongs to my private biography.

If memory of the white clustered villages on green-sloped Pyrenees, or the multihued fall vineyards near Carcassonne, exercised some influence in the formulation of Lyndon Johnson’s program for natural beauty, my European experience was most often of practical use at state dinners and other presidential functions in a tedious exchange of animated banalities with often rich and worldly fellow guests.

My experience in the army had more direct influence on the attitudes I would bring to high politics and the White House. I despised it, of course. Not the army itself, or the idea of the army, or the purpose of the army, but my condition of military servitude: a lowly private, ordered and organized and arranged; compelled to prepare myself and my belongings for innumerable inspections, assigned on regular rotation to scrub the kitchen pots and floor. My distaste, therefore, was largely a matter of rank, and could have been transformed into something approaching enjoyment had I been promoted to general or, even better, commander of NATO. (Not too many years later I visited the Pentagon to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff on our policy toward Cuba. As I confronted the array of spangled shoulders, shined and crowded stars reflecting the bright fluorescents with a terrestrial Milky Way of light, there was a moment of exultation — a child’s fantasy come true — which was intensified by my intuition from across the room of surly resentment at having been ordered into the presence of this kid, ex-Corporal Goodwin.)

In what then seemed a natural response to discontent, I began, tentatively at first, then systematically, to find ways of evading military discipline. And with enormous success. In my entire overseas tour, I never stood an inspection, avoided all company duties, manipulated the excessive passes and leave time that enabled me to tour most of Europe, and managed an early discharge — quite honorable — which allowed me to return home for the entire summer preceding my second year of law school. Indeed, I was technically AWOL during my entire overseas tour.

Shortly after being assigned to a barracks, but before my face and name were fixed in the mental landscape of platoon leaders, I managed a three-day pass from which I never returned to my designated corner of the company. Reentering the camp on a Sunday night, I stole a mattress, which I kept rolled in the locker in the small wooden structure housing the Troop Information and Education Office to which I had been assigned. Every evening, after sunset, I carried my mattress and blanket in search of an empty bunk — a man on leave or in the hospital. At reveille I rushed to the quarters assigned to a company of Polish guards, who soon gave up their occasional queries directed at the eccentric young American who came to wash and shave among them.

I was on the base for duty, appeared regularly at company formations, but, a man without a home, I did not appear on any duty rosters, left no unexplained vacancy when I failed to stand inspection.

I ingratiated myself with my superiors — thus lowering the threshold of potential suspicion, and ensuring a lenient disregard of my late return from passes and leaves — by putting my imagination at the service of their professional needs and apprehensions.

My most impressive triumph took place when, just before a major headquarters inspection, it was discovered that we had one more two-and-a-half-ton truck than the total (almost a thousand) recorded in the shipping manifests. For days we counted and recounted, but the discrepancy remained. The possibility of some error in the records was unthinkable or, at least, inadmissible — to us and, more importantly, to headquarters. But the truck was there. Observing the captain’s mounting panic, I suggested that the only escape from this dilemma was to bury the truck. Working at night, a handful of trusted men, under my supervision, dug a large pit far back in the forest, drove the truck in, and covered it with earth, where, I assume, its rusting remains still repose. The inspectors found everything in perfect order, the captain was delighted, and I went to Paris on a special pass.

My success in exploiting the vulnerabilities of bureaucracy left me with a dangerously incomplete understanding. About a week before I was to return to the United States, I encountered my platoon commander, ROTC Lieutenant Lloyd, while walking from my office to the mess hall. Confronting me directly, he said, Well, Goodwin. I hope you’re all ready for the big inspection Saturday.

Yes sir, I replied.

He didn’t move. I could sense, behind his acutely attentive gaze, a puzzled struggle of recall. Had he ever seen me at an inspection? When? My facial muscles tensed, my rigidity of expression a mask for fear. Disobedience of orders. Court-martial. Disqualification for the bar. Leavenworth. The silent moment seemed interminable. He knew. To this day I believe that at the surface of awareness he knew he had never seen me at any inspection. But his upbringing on a midwestern farm, the arduous routine of chores fulfilled, had left his imagination without the reach to encompass so heinous and prolonged a defiance of orders. Miss one inspection, default on a single assignment — of course. Readily noted, quickly punished. But never; not once in eighteen months. It was not to be grasped. I’ll look for you, Goodwin, he said, turning to leave.

Yes, sir, I replied, the fear draining away. I had just seen the other face of bureaucracy — not the amiable bumbling of institutionalized mediocrity, but the coercive force by which authority is sustained. Defiance of established institutions, of the system, was not a game for children, but a hazardous course where failure or defeat could impose large and serious consequences. I had learned a lesson. But not completely. For despite the fearful narrowness of my escape I would not attend Lieutenant Lloyd’s last inspection. Using stratagems far too labyrinthine for description, I managed to have myself sent by official order to another post for my final weekend. It was not an act of principle, a statement of moral courage. I had a no-hitter going. It was the last of the ninth. Two outs. I couldn’t lose it now, not if I could help it, whatever it took.

In December of 1955, while I was trifling with authority in the forests of France, a black seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, undertook to defy an entire, deeply rooted culture of injustice when she refused to obey the driver’s order that she move to a seat in the rear, or colored, section of the bus; and with that single act of courageous defiance began — not chronologically but spiritually — the period we now know as the sixties. Rosa Parks’s disobedience to established order crystallized a mass of resentments and desires into a new struggle for black freedom, and propelled Martin Luther King, Jr., from the anonymity of his Atlanta pulpit to a national leadership that transformed him into the most towering figure of the decade. That single act initiated an unprecedented period of protest, aspiration, conflict, and progress, which was, in defiance of events, to be formally dated from the election of John Kennedy in 1960.

I returned from my army assignment for my final two years at Harvard Law School, unaware that I was also returning to a country on the edge of tumultuous change; or that I would play a part in the events of change. I was going back for a law degree, and then … well, I wasn’t sure.

2 / The Justice

YOU ARE NOW on the cursus honorum." The speaker was Professor Abe Chayes, standing beside me at the buffet table of a cocktail party to honor the graduating members of the class of 1958 who had served as editors of the Harvard Law Review. I instantly understood his meaning, the way of honor. I was first in my class of five hundred, president of the Harvard Law Review, and on my way to serve as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Thence, following a well-marked, oft-trodden path, I would serve in the real world, most probably as an associate with a Wall Street mega-law firm, and then become a professor at the law school.

Fuck that were the words I didn’t say, as I nodded in seeming acquiescence. I had already concluded that big-time law — i.e., corporate law — was an occupation for skilled servants of business; distinguished from accountants, secretaries, and chauffeurs only by the historic prestige of their professional status and the size of their fees. Yet I did not have an alternative. I had thought of returning to Boston and opening my own one-man law office. But who would my clients be?

Several months before my graduation, Sumner Kaplan, a neighbor in Brookline, who was also a representative to the state legislature, had taken me to a small, upper-floor apartment in downtown Boston where Senator John F. Kennedy maintained his Massachusetts residence. A man called Frank Morrissey took our coats. Morrissey had served as a kind of personal factotum to Joseph P. Kennedy and, for years, had been assigned to keep watch on young John’s activities so the father could be alerted to any hazards — personal or public — that might obstruct the career of his swiftly rising son. The outer room was crowded with a variety of politicians and lobbyists, for whom the senator’s appearance in Boston was a chance to advance a favored project or impress a lucrative client. I knew none of them either by sight or name.

In about twenty minutes we were taken to a small sitting room, where the senator, already standing, greeted my friend Sumner, shook my hand, and said, I understand you’re going to work for Frankfurter. As I nodded in confirmation, he added, He’s not my greatest fan. Give me a call when you get there. He then waved briefly toward three men who were entering the room behind us, smiled warmly in our direction, and strode toward his new visitors. With a skill whose exercise was totally concealed from my understanding, without the slightest sign of dismissal or termination, our encounter was ended. And, in milliseconds, lest there be any confusion, Morrissey had Sumner by the arm. It was so nice of you to come. I know the senator appreciates everything you’ve done.

That was it. I had made my first contact with national politics. As I headed for the subway, I looked at my watch, calculating the time I had remaining to study for an approaching exam. It was back to reality. More than a year passed before I realized that something had happened. I — a hater of organization and contemner of bureaucracies — had taken a first, essential step toward a career in the most monumental, complex, and overpopulated of all American institutions: the government of the whole, frigging United States of America.

Liberated from the schoolhouse, I prepared to return to Washington, unaware my education was to begin. I had gladly accepted the clerkship with Mr. Justice Frankfurter — an unrefusable honor and, not incidentally, a way to postpone career decisions — not knowing that in the brief year with the justice I would have found not an employer, but a mentor, whose beliefs and intensity of engagement with life would irrevocably fortify and shape my own beliefs and values.

Though I had studied some of his opinions, the arid discourse of the classroom had not prepared me for my first personal encounter. In April of my graduation year, on a visit to Cambridge Frankfurter had asked to meet with his new law clerk. Seated in a small sitting room adjoining the offices of Dean Erwin Griswold, I indifferently scanned the morning papers, when the door opened and a small, almost tiny man strode through the door and approached me with hand outstretched, moving swiftly, seeming to bound slightly off the floor with every step, like a gliding kangaroo. So you’re Goodwin, he said, placing his hand on my arm with that strong, fierce grip I was to come to know well. Yes, Mr. Justice, I replied, suddenly conscious of my rumpled suit, the overlong hair tumbling across my forehead. Good, he responded, not, I was later to learn, as a signal of approbation (there was little in my appearance to inspire praise), but a sign that with his fraternal grasp I was being welcomed into that honored group of clerks, now reaching back over a generation, that constituted the justice’s extended family, the formidable substitute for the children he never had.

They tell me you’re very bright, he said. I had no response. Well, he said, we’ll find out soon enough, the smile removing the sting from his words.

I’ll be down just as soon as the school year is finished.

Take a vacation first, he admonished. August will be soon enough.

I don’t need one. I’d like to get right to work.

His voice suddenly became solemn, a tone adopted for lessons to be remembered, his finger outstretched; Young man, there’s something I want you to remember for the rest of your career. The laws of physiology are inexorable.

What had such laws to do with me, in my twenties, exuberant with anxious vitality? But his manner seemed to convey some undecipherable wisdom. And, he was the boss. (As it turned out, my vacation, even though later abbreviated, could not have been better timed, for early that summer I married Sandra Leverant, a Vassar graduate whom I had known since high school.)

Then, as swiftly as he had entered, the justice relaxed his grip, headed for the exit, turning at the door to repeat in stentorian tones: Remember, take a vacation. Then he laughed and was gone. I stood there half-expecting to hear the sound of sleigh bells on the roof of Langdell Hall. It had been a